​George Washington introduced a personal finance model to 21st century Americans in 1766

By Jeffrey Reeves MA

EUREKONOMICS[tm]

Americans today are blessed with advanced financial products that the founders were just beginning to develop. In particular, Americans in the 21st century have access to the most powerful, versatile, and flexible financial product ever conceived by the ingenuity of American businesses: participating whole life insurance, which allows today's Americans to control the money that flows through their lives like no other product available in the panoply of financial instruments.

Although EUREKONOMICS™1 is a unique word created to describe a system for creating personal wealth and managing personal finances, George Washington used the same system to create his personal wealth and, along with the other founders, to launch the American economy that has become the envy of the world.

Joseph J. Ellis, in "His Excellency: George Washington"2 writes that the father of our country, unlike Thomas Jefferson and others from the elite class of the day, demonstrated "...concern for his own economic interest..." Ellis adds parenthetically that "Perhaps this is the underlying reason Jefferson and so many other[s]...would die in debt, and Washington would die a very wealthy man."

This insight into economics and the thoughtful management of financial resources may also be why the early Americans chose George Washington as our first president. Early America knew that looking out for our country's financial well being was a primary duty of our presidents.

Washington, unlike many of his peers, chose "...to act in a direct and personal fashion to recover his own independence from..." the British government and their elitist allies in business and commerce who treated Americans with a certain amount of disdain and ignored their cries for justice and pleas for liberty.

How did Washington unfetter himself from the British elite? The Ellis biography describes it this way3:

Starting in 1766, Washington abandoned tobacco — a British obsession — as his cash crop at Mt. Vernon. The father of our country decided that from then on, he would grow wheat. He built his own mill to grind his wheat into flour and sold the flour in Alexandria and Norfolk.

Not yet president, Washington also built his own fishing boat and harvested herring and shad from the Potomac. He sold the catch locally. Washington also purchased a ship to carry his flour, fish, and corn to such distant markets as Lisbon, Portugal.In addition, Washington conceived and developed a full-scale spinning and weaving operation.

George Washington made it quite clear that he was determined to defy the pattern of indebtedness to the British behemoths that swallowed up his contemporaries.

What George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and the other founders discovered and understood in 1766 was that “We the people...” cannot claim our liberty and our freedom if we are subservient to government or to the business, union, and lobbyists that maintain symbiotic relationships with government.
The 21st century behemoths in the ruling class that exploit Americans today under the guise of conventional wisdom are no different from the 18th century British king, Parliament, and merchants.

The behemoths have misled and misinformed 21st century Americans about almost every aspect of wealth creation and personal financial management. Americans today need to relearn what the founders knew about money; they need to practice what the founders practiced when they created wealth and managed their personal finances and the finances of early America.

The blessings of progress

Americans today are blessed with advanced financial products that the founders were just beginning to develop. In particular, Americans in the 21st century have access to the most powerful, versatile, and flexible financial product ever conceived by the ingenuity of American businesses: participating whole life insurance, which allows today's Americans to control the money that flows through their lives like no other product available in the panoply of financial instruments.

The retiree that opts to reduce current income to accommodate a longer life span

Unfortunately, many Americans have been led astray, have relinquished control of their money to anonymous investment fund advisors, qualified retirement plans like 401(k)s over which they have little or no control, and have opted out of actively creating wealth and managing their personal finances.

Beginning during the Carter administration and continuing through the Clinton, Bush and especially the Obama presidencies, the federal government, financial entities, and social institutions seized control of more and more of the personal finances of individuals and families based on the faulty premise that big knows best. The effect of these decisions on personal finances is apparent today in the painful rate of unemployment, the high foreclosure rate, falling investment values and returns, and the tsunami of bankruptcies.
However, in the past few years, an old and thoroughly proven idea — that each American and each American family can and should keep control of the money that flows through their lives — has risen like a phoenix from the ashes of a conflagration of disinformation and misinformation that started in the 1970s.

We call this resurrected idea EUREKONOMICS™.

The idea aims to show Americans how to use the power, flexibility and versatility of participating whole life insurance to create a personal finance model that lets them:

create a secure retirement income they won't have to work for and they can't outlive

and perhaps most importantly, pay forward a legacy of wisdom and wealth to those they care most about

The 13 immutable laws

Here is a list of the 13 immutable laws that the founders knew and followed in the terms of their day. Modern America has been taught that these laws are no longer valid and that we should trust the government, the financial behemoths, the unions, AARP and its ilk ... not!

1. The Law of Liberty: To the extent that others — especially governments — control your personal finances, they deny your personal liberty.

2. The Law of Economic Know-How: Successful personal financial models rely on knowledge of economic principles, understanding the application of those principles to one’s personal situation, and wise decisions about how and when to apply them.

3. The Law of the Behemoths: The economic system in the modern world champions the behemoths — big government, big unions, big bureaucracies, and big businesses — at the expense of individual personal finances.

4. The Tax Law: Tax deductibility is a trap.The government always writes tax law to its own advantage.

5. The Foundation Law: Every successful personal financial plan rests on a foundation of accessible cash money. Participating whole life insurance policies are the best product available to hold the money in that foundation.

6. The Law of the Four Pillars: There are four, and only four, measures of successful personal finances: freedom from debt, ready cash, secure income and a legacy.

7. The First Law of Wealth Creation: You must manage cash flow to create wealth.

8.The Second Law of Wealth Creation:You cannot buy wealth. What creates wealth is limiting risk to the creative use of money.

9. The Law of Debt: Debt-to-others is never good.It can be useful and important, but it is never good in a personal financial model. Borrowing money from others is not how the rich got rich.

10. The Law of Speculation: What conventional wisdom refers to as an investment is really a speculation, according to Benjamin Graham. Speculation is gambling.

11. The First Law of Investing: Investing is appropriate only for a very small number of Americans.

12.The Second Law of Investing: If you invest, invest only from savings that you commit to replace, never from income.

13.The Law of Returns: Average rate of return, whether illustrating past performance or future results, is useless in managing personal finances. The actual rate of return — year after year — and the creative use of cash values provided by participating whole life insurance is the surest, safest and fastest way to wealth.

1EUREKONOMICS™ gets its pizzazz from “EUREKA” — a Greek word popularized by the story of Archimedes, who ran naked through the streets of Athens exclaiming EUREKA! (“I found it!”) when he solved a particularly thorny scientific problem while bathing.

EUREKONOMICS™ gets its power from “economics”— a discipline that creates wealth but falls short on the excitement meter and sends people running for a different reason.